Really America?

How? How is it possible that this diseased and incompetent government, to which I already send a large chunk of every paycheck, needs yet another piece of the little bit that I earn? I have less than a third of the income of some people who I know for a fact are receiving rebates this year.

I suppose things would be different if we'd been good enough to reproduce, purchase property, i.e., be proper American worker-bees. But having made the choice to not be Breeders and having neither the cash nor the desire to purchase property, we are being punished by a system that seems designed to torment people like us.

Maybe we should have purchased land. Hell, there was a streak of a few years where people with no credit history, no collateral and (if you believe some of the stories) no proof of citizenship were able to buy property in America. Yeah, they eventually defaulted on the loans and got evicted, but so what? They probably got a nice fat tax rebate every year they had the house and their credit is probably mostly recovered by now.

I need to get out of this chicken-shit banana republic. I need to find someplace where I can pursue a fulfilling career, not be buried in usurious credit debt and keep a decent chunk of my earnings. Preferably somewhere that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S., 'cause I'd like to do a little damage on my way out the door.

Pimpin' ain't easy, but apparently being a ho' is paying better than ever

I'm not feeling especially well today, so it's possible that I'm overreacting to this piece from Think Progress. But my gut-level disgust at American culture has been growing exponentially for quite some time now, so I'm going to assume that the nausea I'm feeling is more along the lines of a rational physical symptom inspired by this latest bit of irrational news.

It shouldn't surprise anyone to hear that a Palin is involved in bilking a charity, particularly one that may not have even been created with the most charitable of intentions. This is a family whose matriarch makes Huey Long seem like the soul of selflessness and civic duty. I've no inclination to run through the laundry list of sins committed by Klan Palin; I think they're fairly well etched into the public consciousness and my stomach's only just stopped heaving. But this kind of thing seems to have become a generational affair. The mother's obviously passed her polecat-like survival instincts on to her offspring.

I think the Daily Kos said it best:

"I think the takeaway message here is that baby out of wedlock = BEST. DECISION. EVER."

Indeed had I, in my wildest pubescent fantasies, ever dreamt that a teen pregnancy could turn out so splendidly, I would have gotten my high school girlfriend with-child toot sweet, before a year-and-a-half of chemotherapy turned my swimmers into little more than microscopic bumper cars.